Hi, I’m Harrison Goohs. For over a decade, I’ve used cartography as a way of thinking seriously about history.
I first began sketching maps in class in high school, but in 2014—while living in Belgium—I painted my first endonym map of Europe. I was struck by how far English place names often drift from local usage, and I wanted to understand what was lost in translation. That question stayed with me through my studies at Georgetown University and during my Fulbright research in Austria, where mapping became less of a pastime and more of a way to engage seriously with history across languages and traditions.
I approach cartography as a form of historical interpretation. Every map on this site is the result of sustained research into how people in the past understood space, authority, and belonging—and how those understandings differ from our modern, post-Westphalian assumptions. The goal is not to reproduce historical maps, but to use contemporary cartographic clarity to make older worlds intelligible again, while preserving their strangeness.
In 2015, I began a long-term personal project to create a history book composed entirely of maps. It begins with the contemporary world and moves backward and forward in time, tracing the rise, transformation, and dissolution of major polities—from the Akkadian Empire to the present. The project is deliberately slow. Each map represents weeks of research and years of accumulated familiarity with a subject.
I earned my master’s degree in European History at Oxford, where I focused on the late Holy Roman Empire and the intellectual world surrounding its collapse. Although I originally hoped to pursue an academic career, I ultimately found cartography to be a more compelling medium for the kind of historical work I wanted to do: rigorous, synthetic, and publicly legible. Researching a single moment deeply enough to map it—often across multiple archives, languages, and historiographical debates—allows me to remain a historian first, and an artist second.
Ultimately, I want to use the beauty of cartography to shed light on an often obscure past.
Disclaimer: All views expressed here are strictly my own and do not represent those of the U.S. Government.